Technological advancements have made wireless communications devices inexpensive and accordingly ubiquitous. With increase in mobile computing devices such as laptops, tablets, personal digital assistants, etc. there has been a continuous demand to connect them wirelessly and efficiently. A Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) is a computer network that implements the connection of multiple wireless devices.
Wireless devices connect to a wireless access point in order to gain access to a wireless network. The most commonly used wireless network standard is IEEE 802.11. Most of the computing devices used nowadays have built-in wireless capability i.e. the computing devices are capable of connecting to a wireless network. Examples of such computing devices may include mobile devices, such as personal digital assistants, smartphones, music players, media centers and the like. A computing device attempting to transfer data in a wireless network present in its vicinity needs to establish a connection with the network. A preliminary step in establishing connection includes the access point identifying itself by transmitting a service set identifier (SSID) in a broadcast packet. The broadcast packet is received by all the wireless devices present in the network. A computing device can complete the connection establishment process by exchanging information with the wireless access point, such as security information, bandwidth information, wireless network id, network name and the like. Completion of connection establishment with the wireless network takes a certain amount of time, which is bandwidth inefficient.
Moreover, if the data transfer required by the mobile computing device is in the form of small data packets, a connection oriented approach necessitates a substantial overhead in the form of time delay due to connection establishment process. Additionally, in the case of multiple computing devices requiring access to a network simultaneously, a connection-oriented approach requires all the computing devices to establish and remain connected with the network, in order to receive data. This causes a reduction in throughput of the data transfer within the network.
Consequently, there is a need for a system and method for providing connectionless data transfer to mobile wireless devices. One of the methods of providing connectionless data transfer is fragmenting user data into individual fragments and transmitting each fragment by embedding it in the SSID field of a beacon frame. At the receiver, the fragments are extracted from the beacon frames and are reassembled to obtain the user data.
In a connectionless data transfer, a transmitted frame might be lost either due to data corruption or if the sender and receiver are not in sync with each other. As a result, the client might require more than one broadcast cycle to receive all the fragmented frames, which might result in a decrease in throughput. Thus, there is a need for a system and method to provide for a robust data loss recovery in a wireless network employing connectionless data transfer.